The summer days wore on. My hands grew rougher and coarser with hard work, yet just as surely increased their dexterity in holding the brush with a firm grasp and giving flexible and delicate strokes to finer work. My lessons and new forge left but little time for the cottage and Annie Bray now. Moreover, she, too, changed as the months wore on. When did I ever imagine, with all my growing plans and manhood, that she also was to have her work and purpose in the world? Yet she had made her visit to Hillside, had been not only amused and delighted, but instructed, by all she saw there. I was too deeply engrossed in self-development to continue my attention to her studies; but Miss Merton, inspired by Miss Darry's example, or attracted by the modest sweetness so congenial to her own womanly character, undertook the unwonted occupation of teaching; and Mr. Lang, greatly to my surprise, encouraged her in it. Three afternoons in the week Annie went to Hillside to receive a course of instruction, barren of system and conducted with supreme disregard of plainer and more useful branches, yet bringing out in a graceful way all her peculiarly refined tastes. Annie's hours rarely admitted of my walking home with her; and though occasionally she stopped at the forge, on her way through the village, it was only for a moment, and that often a busy one with me. She had grown taller and paler, sadder in expression, too, I fancied, notwithstanding the new interest at Hillside. But then she was leaving childhood behind her; her father had been more rough than ever since I left him; and with a momentary pity and wonder that she was more shy of my fond and brotherly ways than formerly, I ascribed it to these ordinary causes, and kept steadily at my work. It was not for me, the _protege_ of so brilliant a woman as Frank Darry, and a rising genius, to pause in my career for the pale cheeks of the village blacksmith's daughter.